Free Writing on the Wall by Mary McCarthy Page A

writing this, I have gone back and reread Eichmann in Jerusalem as objectively as I can. My original feeling was that the part allotted to the Jewish leadership was quite small in the whole story Miss Arendt told. It had not struck me particularly, especially since it was not new; anybody who had followed the Kastner case or had read reviews of the Hilberg book was familiar with the fact of Jewish co-operation; such co-operation, indeed, was only another facet of the story told in concentration-camp literature by Rousset, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Bettelheim, and others: the leaders of the victims co-operated with their jailers. My original feeling proved to be right: in a book of two hundred and sixty pages, eight pages are devoted to the co-operation of the Jewish leadership with Eichmann’s office, and two and a quarter pages to a discussion of privileged categories of Jews (war veterans, famous people, etc.). Both passages are certainly critical, and the second, which reviews the conduct not only of Jews but of Gentile groups in pressing the Nazis for “special” treatment for special Jews, seems to me harsher. Besides this there are passing references to Jewish co-operation or the lack of it.
    Now some of Miss Arendt’s critics complain that she gave too much space and prominence to this topic (how can one measure prominence?), while others, including Abel, say that her treatment was too short. The only way to have satisfied both parties would have been to omit the whole subject, which is probably what most Jews would have liked best. My conclusion is that those who were truly shocked and pained by these “revelations” were not shocked and pained by the fact (which they must have known about at least vaguely) but by the context in which it was put. Miss Arendt’s boldness was putting this distressing material in the context of the Nazi guilt, where Jews felt it did not belong, where it was “out of all proportion.” To speak in the same breath of the guilt of Eichmann and the guilt of the Judenräte seemed offensive, like equating them; yet Miss Arendt never for one instant equates them, and how could she assess the activities of Eichmann while suppressing the part played by the Jewish leaders, with whom his office constantly dealt?
    When she writes her famous sentence (often distorted in quotation), “To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story,” she is expressing the same pain her Jewish readers felt in reading her summary of that “dark chapter” and for which they are ready to condemn her, as a tyrant used to condemn to death the messenger of bad news. The “darkest chapter,” incidentally, does not mean the worst; it means the hardest to contemplate, for a Jew.
    As for Abel’s contention that she ought to have discussed the motives and arguments of the Jewish leaders, she indicates that these motives ranged from high to low, as one would expect. Abel’s imagination was demonstrably quite able to reconstruct the arguments that must have taken place—a feat not beyond the power of the ordinary reader. Possibly what some Jews feared was that though they themselves could understand these motives, others (Gentiles?) might not. What many of her critics hold against her is that she tried to understand Eichmann and does not make the same effort for the Jewish leaders. But their behavior is quite understandable, unlike that of the Nazis. They acted the way most respectable citizens would; they temporized, tried not to think the worst, looked for a formula that would placate the enemy. The name of this in politics is appeasement. Miss Arendt, says Abel, does not mention the middle-class character of the Jewish Councils. She did not have to.
    Abel claims that Miss Arendt blames the leadership for not having resisted. She does not. The question of resistance is raised on pages nine and ten of her book. Her conclusion